Archive for the ‘constitutional’ Category

With Iowans going today to their caucuses, the beginning of a new year and the presidential primary season dangerously collide for voters. Distraught voters can now couple their prior unrealized weight-loss resolutions with their unrealized political resolutions like finding a new party or moving to Canada. Yet, every four years, we end up fatter and madder by the year’s end. It is not the fact that, in a nation of more than 300 million people, our massive pool of potential presidents never seems to work to our advantage in producing high-quality candidates. It is not even the fact that our elections seem like contests of blow-dried, poll-driven robots. Rather, it is the overt insincerity of American politics. Candidates routinely reinvent themselves for the primary and then reinvent themselves again for the general election — often discarding prior positions like last year’s resolutions.

This election, the nation is debating fundamental moral and constitutional questions that demand something other than the usual transient or opportunistic views of politicians. A candidate’s views on taxation may change with time, even a short passage of time. However, changing one’s view on the use of torture or abortion or gay rights reflects a fundamental flaw in both character and conscience.

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chavez suffered a stunning defeat Monday in a referendum that would have let him run for re-election indefinitely and impose a socialist system in this major U.S. oil provider.

Voters defeated the sweeping measures Sunday by a vote of 51 percent to 49 percent, said Tibisay Lucena, chief of the National Electoral Council, with voter turnout at just 56 percent.

WASHINGTON — Americans are wondering, with the lassitude of uninvolved spectators, whether the president will initiate a war with Iran. Some Democratic presidential candidates worry, or purport to, that he might claim an authorization for war in a Senate resolution labeling an Iranian Revolutionary Guard unit a terrorist organization. Some Democratic representatives oppose the president’s request for $88 million to equip B-2 stealth bombers to carry huge “bunker-buster” bombs, hoping to thereby impede a presidential decision to attack Iran’s hardened nuclear facilities.

While legislators try to leash a president by tinkering with a weapon, a sufficient leash — the Constitution — is being ignored by them. They are derelict in their sworn duty to uphold it. Regarding the most momentous thing government does, make war, the constitutional system of checks and balances is broken.